Saturday, August 2, 2014

The ongoing Israeli military action against Hamas has
produced some important political realignments.

American liberals are divided, rather visibly, between those who
blame Israel and those who support it.

Amazingly, American Christian groups have been more
vocal in supporting Israel than is AIPAC, so you know something is afoot. When Ted
Cruz gets ahead of Chuck Schumer in denouncing the FAA for stopping all flights into Tel
Aviv, you know something is shifting.

From Andrew Sullivan to Jonathan Chait to Jonathan Friedland
to Naomi Wolf to The Economist (et tu,
Economist) some people on the left blame Israel for failing to negotiate with
Hamas.

None dare call it anti-Semitism, but the evidence does not easily
lend itself to another conclusion. Is there anything about Hamas that affirms
the values that these thinkers pretend to hold? One might say that your
political alliances say more about your values than your bloviating.

And then, of course, the Obama administration is trying to
be even-handed. Yet, it arrives at a position that is identical to that of
Hamas. What would you expect from Jeremiah Wright’s protégé? I’m sure you
recall that Wright’s church newsletter used to print propaganda screeds by
Hamas.

Be this as it may, the second most important political
alignment is happening in the Middle East itself. For once Israel is not alone
in its fight against Islamist terrorism. It has been joined by Egypt, Jordan,
the Gulf Emitares and Saudi Arabia.

Among those supporting Hamas are Turkey, Qatar and Iran. For
reasons that escape everyone the Obama administration seems to have turned
toward Turkey and Qatar and away from Israel and Egypt.

Whether this new alliance is anything more than a temporary
convenience, it suggests that some major players in the region are more opposed
to Hamas than they are to Israel.

The New York Times presented the best account of this story.
Written by David Kirkpatrick it explained clearly the geopolitical realignment
that has been produced by the current conflict.

Kirkpatrick wrote:

After
the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has
led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight
against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip….

“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of
political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin
Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at
the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under
several presidents.

“I have
never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing
in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The
silence is deafening.”

I think it fair to say that the crack Obama-Kerry foreign
policy team was caught flatfooted:

Although
Egypt is traditionally the key go-between in any talks with Hamas — deemed a
terrorist group by the United States and Israel — the government in Cairo this
time surprised Hamas by publicly proposing a cease-fire agreement that met most
of Israel’s demands and none from the Palestinian group. Hamas was tarred as intransigent
when it immediately rejected it, and Cairo has continued to insist that its
proposal remains the starting point for any further discussions.

But as
commentators sympathetic to the Palestinians slammed the proposal as a ruse to
embarrass Hamas, Egypt’s Arab allies praised it. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
called President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt the next day to commend it, Mr.
Sisi’s office said, in a statement that cast no blame on Israel but referred
only to “the bloodshed of innocent civilians who are paying the price for a
military confrontation for which they are not responsible.”

And then, there was the Arab Spring. When it first broke
out, I believed that the most important question was whether or not the crack
Obama-Clinton foreign policy team could manage it.

Turns out, they could not.

Their betrayal of Mubarak, enthusiastic embrace of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, their mishandling of the situation in Libya showed the
Middle East that Obama’s America was on the wrong side of history.

Kirkpatrick has an important observation about the Arab
Spring:

The
dynamic has inverted all expectations of the Arab Spring uprisings. As recently
as 18 months ago, most analysts in Israel, Washington and the Palestinian territories
expected the popular uprisings to make the Arab governments more responsive to
their citizens, and therefore more sympathetic to the Palestinians and more
hostile to Israel.

But
instead of becoming more isolated, Israel’s government has emerged for the
moment as an unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing tumult, now tacitly
supported by the leaders of the resurgent conservative order as an ally in
their common fight against political Islam.

Of course, many Gulf nations are aligning themselves with Israel
because they believe that Iran poses the greatest threat to them. As it
happens, this alignment has been ongoing for some time:

Egypt
and other Arab states, especially the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates, are finding themselves allied with Israel in a
common opposition to Iran, a rival regional power that has a history of funding
and arming Hamas.

Barack Obama and John Kerry were unprepared:

For
Washington, the shift poses new obstacles to its efforts to end the fighting.
Although Egyptian intelligence agencies continue to talk with Hamas, as they
did under former President Hosni Mubarak and Mr. Morsi, Cairo’s new animosity
toward the group has called into question the effectiveness of that channel,
especially after the response to Egypt’s first proposal.

As a
result, Secretary of State John Kerry turned to the more Islamist-friendly
states of Qatar and Turkey as alternative mediators — two states that grew in
regional stature with the rising tide of political Islam after the Arab Spring,
and that have suffered a degree of isolation as that tide has ebbed.

But
that move has put Mr. Kerry in the incongruous position of appearing to some
analysts as less hostile to Hamas — and thus less supportive of Israel — than
Egypt or its Arab allies.

Foreign policy is extremely complicated and extremely
difficult. It is no place for amateurs.

As a footnote, CNN just published its own story about the
region’s political realignment:

"This
is unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict," says CNN's
Ali Younes, an analyst who has covered the region for decades. "Most Arab
states are actively supporting Israel against the Palestinians -- and not even
shy about it or doing it discreetly."

It's a
"joint Arab-Israeli war consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia against
other Arabs -- the Palestinians as represented by Hamas."

And also:

"The
Israel-Hamas conflict has laid bare the new divides of the Middle East,"
says Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at
the American Enterprise Institute. "It's no longer the Muslims against the
Jews. Now it's the extremists -- the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and
their backers Iran, Qatar and Turkey -- against Israel and the more moderate
Muslims including Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia."

"It's
a proxy war for control or dominance in the Middle East," says CNN's
Fareed Zakaria….

From
the perspective of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and some other Arab
states, what the Israeli Prime Minister is doing is fighting this war against
Hamas on their behalf so they can finish the last stronghold of the Muslim
Brotherhood," Younes says.

"Arab
governments and official Arab media have all but adopted the Israeli view of
who is a terrorist and who is not. Egyptian and Saudi-owned media are liberal
in labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as 'terrorists' and describing Hamas as a
'terrorist organization.' It's a complete turnabout from the past, when Arab
states fought Israel and the U.S. in the international organizations on the
definition of terrorism, and who is a terrorist or a 'freedom fighter.'"

Surely, this is important news. It’s good to see the mainstream media
covering it.

Also, neocons want to move to the Democrats because uncool GOP's closeness with Israel has made Israel uncool in many 'progressive' circles rich powerful blue cities that dominate America.

When the GOP was powerful, neocons relied on GOP support. But GOP is finished as a national party because of demographic changes, the super-rich supports the Democrats, erosion of the middle class due to globalism, and even children of conservatives are educated/indoctrinated by Democrat teachers and pop culture.

So, neocons are feeling that their alliance with GOP is now more counter-productive than beneficial. To make Israel cool again, neocons feel that Israel must be separated from uncool 'racist and homophobic' Republicans who 'wage war on women'.

Of course, there will still be neocons sticking with the GOP to ensure that Republicans will remain pro-Zionist, but the die has been cast as to the grand neocon agenda. Neocons will move toward the Democrats.